Is Physical Attractiveness More Important than Professional Competency?

The international tourist hotel industry that focuses on quality of the “tangible” service is a typical high-contact service. To survive in the recent competitive work environment, many enterprises enhance their competitiveness in the process of service employee selection and emphasize the importance of physical attractiveness. This study uses self-confidence as a moderator which is rare relevant empirical evidence to confirm the relationships between physical attractiveness, professional competence and service attitude. The results show that confidence of the service personnel, physical attractiveness and professional competence have positive significant correlation relationships with service attitude. Service personnel's “self-confidence” is the most important variable towards service attitude. The study borrows selection and training functions of human resource management to integrate the knowledge of psychology, marketing management to expand the theory.

The Productivity Challenge Facing the Global Hospitality Industry

This chapter introduces the global productivity challenge facing the hospitality industry. Global competition in the hospitality industry has led to increasing pressure on profit levels. To leverage profits hotels increasingly are forced to evaluate their operational performance. Specifically, the global productivity challenge entails that hotel managers to a greater extent must encompass a cost minimization perspective. With the integration of productivity-enhancing software systems in hospitality organizations hotels are becoming increasingly knowledge intensive. This chapter discuss measurement issues, productivity analysis and relevant research findings from empirical research. The empirical research on hotel productivity shows that there are many factors to keep in mind for managers that wish to improve productivity in their organizations. Hopefully this chapter will contribute to clear up the meaning of concepts and broadened the perspective of how productivity are related to all parts of the hospitality enterprise.

Poverty as a Tourism Attraction

The visit of the favela or slum into a tourist destination is seen as a part of the so-called reality tours phenomenon and of the global circulation of the favela as a trademark. Tourist behaviour involves a search for leisure experiences from interactions with features or characteristics of places they choose to visit. Examples are the favelas in Brazil, the township of South Africa, the slum in India that have led to different definitions of “slum tourism”, “poor-poor tourism”, “reality tourism”. Web heavily affect today most of the online activities and their effect on tourism is obviously rather important. The aim of the chapter is to discuss about slum tourism definitions. At the same time, taking Reality Tours and Travel - a wholesaler slum websites - as a case, this study attempts to explore issues of the quality of strategic choices on the web. Considering that the content of web site includes a wide variety of technologies, is important that website offer also interactivity with e-tourists. Through the results of the study, it is possible to gain knowledge of the slum e-tourism.

‘The Impact of Culture on Tourists' Online Information Search Behaviour

This chapter looks into the concept of culture and its impacts on travellers' online information search behaviour. The study is focused on two culturally diametric countries: United Kingdom and China (Hofstede, 2001) and they have been selected as case studies, representing values from the Western and the Asian cultures. In order to examine the effects of culture on online search behaviours, the research adopted a qualitative approach, and data was collected through interviews in order to enhance and elaborate the understanding on the subject studied. The results of this study show that culture influences the travellers' behaviour in the online environment, up to a certain extent, and as a result of this influences, different behavioural patterns between the British and the Chinese travellers emerged. Moreover, these findings bring implications for the marketers aiming at the British and the Chinese tourists, and they highlight the need to adopt different strategies in designing and marketing their tourism products for these two particular markets.

Socially Responsible Practices in Hotels

The aim of this work is to study social responsible behavior in three, four and five star hotels found in Galicia and the Northern region of Portugal. To be able to carry out this investigation two types of analysis are carried out. First of all there is a descriptive statistical analysis about the group of variables contained in the used scale. Secondly a factor analysis is applied in which the factors that make up social responsibility in line with the triple dimension identified by Elkington (1997) are identified. The development of this methodology has made it possible to compare practices of social responsibility carried out by the hotels under study in two different countries, Spain and Portugal. From this investigation it can be concluded that the initial hypothesis is confirmed, corporations behave differently when it comes to social responsibility depending on the country they are in.

Understanding the Indiscipline of Tourism

Over last years, the current growth of tourism flourished in a wealth of courses, Ph.Ds., Masters and academic offerings that positioned tourism as a good perspective for students. Jafar Jafari signaled to the term “scientifization of tourism” to explain the ever-increasing attention given to this new field (Jafari & Aeser, 1988; Jafari, 1990, 2005). At a first stage, the great volume of bibliographic production offered an encouraging prospect in the pathways towards the maturation of this discipline. However, some epistemologists have recently alerted that not only tourism-research failed to develop a unified consensus of what tourism is, but also lack of a coherent epistemology that helps organizing the produced material. In this respect, tourism is subject now to an atmosphere of “indiscipline” where the produced knowledge leads to scattered (limited) conclusions.

Tourism and Crisis

Numerous researchers have highlighted a relative lack of academic attention directly addressing the influence of political economy on achieving sustainability in post-disaster reconstruction (Klein, 2008; Hystad and Keller, 2008; Olsen, 2000; Faulkner, 2001; Glaesser, 2003; Ritchie, 2004). This chapter therefore extends existing academic debates and studies in a number of areas, drawing upon the context of Thailand in the post-Asian tsunami era. In existing academic debates concerning the political economy of post-disaster reconstruction there is a trend towards disaster capitalism (Klein, 2005; Harvey, 2007; Saltman, 2007a). However, this did not occur on Phi Phi. Despite claims of a ‘clean slate' being offered by the tsunami in developmental terms (Pleumarom, 2004; UNDP, 2005; Dodds, 2011; Ko, 2005; Nwankwo and Richardson, 1994; Rice, 2005; Altman, 2005; Brix, 2007; Ghobarah et al., 2006; Dodds et al., 2010), this chapter provides explanation of why this did not and would never exist on Phi Phi, a finding that may be applied to other destinations in a post-disaster context.

Consuming “Innovation” in Tourism

Upon understanding definition, features, application analysis of innovation and relevant theory of the Diffusion of Innovations, this study suggests Augmented Reality (AR) as a technological innovation. AR is an advanced stage of virtual reality that merges reality with computer simulated imageries in the real environment. This chapter synthesizes AR as an emerging and potential technology of digital tourism marketing and management. The aim of this analytical approach based chapter is to understand innovation from tourism product or services consumption perspective. Relevant evidences are also included on lenses of marketing, digitalization and innovation consumption. Results outline that, technology consumption is gradually reshaping and getting supported by the availability and accessibility of electronic formats as AR as a technological innovation. This symbolizes that the consumption of technological innovation as AR offers freedom to select, purchase and recommend in relation to the theory of Diffusion of Innovations by Rogers (1962).

Experience Marketing and Tourism

Tourism is acknowledged to be highly experiential in nature, but despite these characteristics, in the tourism literature there are few articles that adopt the Service-Dominant logic (S-D logic) for studying tourism experiences. The aim of this paper is to apply the S-D logic to the case of Addiopizzo Travel, a Mafia-free project of responsible tourism set up in Sicily, Italy. Results show the role of Addiopizzo Travel as a central node of the network of firms involved in the project and the role that interactions among Addiopizzo Travel, stakeholders, and visitors have in the co-creation of tourists' experience.

Facilitating Hospitality and Tourism Management in Global Business

This chapter explains the overview of hospitality management; the overview of tourism management; product quality, service quality, price, customer satisfaction, and consumer trust in hospitality and tourism management; the significance of hospitality management in global business; the significance of tourism management in global business; and the managerial implications of hospitality and tourism management. Tourism and hospitality industry is one of the most important industries in the modern business world. It is essential to acquire a driving enthusiasm for customer service and a strong sense of professionalism to develop and maintain customer satisfaction in the hospitality and tourism industry. Effective hospitality and tourism management positively affects customer satisfaction, firm growth, and productivity in global business. The chapter argues that facilitating hospitality and tourism management in global business has the potential to enhance organizational performance and reach strategic goals in the digital age.